


Endings

by gondalsqueen



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Legends, Redemption, Revisions, Self-Determination, but give it a chance okay?, okay honestly character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-12
Updated: 2017-05-12
Packaged: 2018-10-31 03:00:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10890282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gondalsqueen/pseuds/gondalsqueen
Summary: Choose your death and I'll tell you the future.





	Endings

Humans tell some quality stories, but we’re crap at endings, mostly because we don’t really understand them. Our whole lives, we’re stuck in the middle of the story—we predict and we hope and we run away, but when the end comes, none of us is around to experience it, and we’re sure not going to write about it for posterity. So our endings are always fake, or fiction. We invent them to give us something we want. And our endings are multiple: Pick your desire, and I’ll tell your fortune.  
  
…  
  
Here’s a possible ending: They live happily ever after. They blow up the Death Star and fly off into the sunset. Some planet’s sunset, anyway. Coruscant falls, they build something called the _New_ Republic, they get married, they work slowly but happily. Five years later they have two children, and after that the last. She rises to power in the galactic government. He hot rods around. They solve mysteries and diffuse threats. Sounds fake, right? They live happily ever after.

Until the kids get older. Because children have their own stories and their own conflicts, and parents stand on the periphery and wonder when they lost control of the narrative. Two of them die—the boys. You don’t see it coming. It doesn’t make sense. It adds nothing to the plot. We call this bad writing, but it’s probably a more truthful account than any other we get. The girl, who is angry and direct and should have fallen—the girl lives. Redemption? Chance? Presumably the story starts over.  
  
…  
  
Here’s another: They blow up the Death Star and fly off into the sunset. She’s pregnant before they take Coruscant, and they’re married five minutes later. They continue to fight, because she’s walled off and vicious and he backs her into corners. But they love each other, and they bump up against the edges of life and come back with only bruises to show for it. And the galaxy is still not a safe place, which means that most of the time they’re fighting for the same team.

The little boy is moody and easily frustrated and sweet, and his mother wonders what her own father was like as a child, worries without saying anything, and snaps at her husband when he voices fears that are too flippant.

There is nothing they can do. There is nothing they can do. They know because over the years, they try everything.

Could they have done something differently, though? That’s a separate story.

The galaxy goes up in flames again.

These tales are cyclical.  
  
…  
  
They retreat, regroup, and resist. They are older now. More tired but more experienced.

They fight again.  
  
…  
  
They fight again.

She has never given up. She pushes him. She dismisses his ideas and refuses to admit that she’s wrong.

He curses and walks away. She’s beating a durasteel wall and making him do the same thing. He gives up.  
  
…  
  
He dies. Impaled on a lightsaber, falling into a pit. No son, no wife, and nothing good coming from the sacrifice. Redemption that doesn’t work.

It’s overkill.  
  
…

She dies. Alone and slowly in her office, of unexpected health complications. Her body shuts down and they don’t find her until morning.

The media makes an announcement. Nobody saw it coming. She was supposed to live forever, bear their abuse and carry them on her shoulders until they no longer needed her. But they still need her.  
  
…  
  
They die. Infinite universes, infinite stories, and always the same ending. Pick your pleasure and I’ll tell your fortune.  
  
…  
  
He doesn’t die. You can’t prove it, nobody saw it. He fell into the pit and got away.

The Force saved him.

Luke saved him.

Chewbacca saved him and is keeping it secret for some reason.  
  
…  
  
He’s a prisoner of the First Order, kept alive to extract information.  
  
…  
  
He escaped into uncharted space. Someday he’ll reclaim his ship and come flying in at the last moment, the cavalry arriving.

Look for him. Wait for him.  
  
…  
  
They don’t kill her.

She’s stood in front of a crowd and denounced tyranny her whole life. She’s been tortured, bereaved, chased, shot at, poisoned. Her children have been kidnapped or turned against her. She spent sixty years with a target on her chest knowing that all time was borrowed time.

She dies clean. Nobody gets to kill her.  
  
…  
  
The galaxy has recently forgotten the betrayal it felt at learning that she was Darth Vader’s daughter. Talk of her schemes to grab power have fallen by the wayside. When she sacrifices her home and her career to face the First Order, nobody can deny that she fights for them.

They don’t have her to stand up for them anymore, so they’re going to have to stand for themselves. On hundreds of worlds they rise in one collective, outraged scream. They dress in white and twist their hair or their lekku or their fur. They put her face on posters. They use her words like blaster bolts.

Choose your death and I’ll tell you the future.

In at least one galaxy this is a true story.

**Author's Note:**

> I started this story partially out of grief, and partially in an attempt to consider the expanded universe next to canon. Then I realized about halfway through that it resembled a Margaret Atwood story that (yes) I have read. Can't remember what it's called. Sorry, Margaret Atwood!


End file.
